Shaolin's Road (Kicker)

[jotego]

Finally, it's here, the public release for Kicker. Extracting the full schematics manually was not the full story. For a specific custom chip, I had to write a small custom code to run in the original board to check what it was doing.

I could verify that the chip was reporting the current scan line to the CPU. The game software actually reads it, but I'm not sure what it does with it as MAME just return a constant zero, and the game seems to run anyway. The video in this link shows the original board running the custom test. I burnt an EEPROM to run the test.

One more difference with current emulators is the refresh rate. The game runs at ~60.6Hz. This may be cumbersome for some screens, so there is an OSD option to set it to 60Hz sharp.

But the most surprising difference is that emulators read the sprite information from what seems to be an internal status table. The hardware is wired to read the sprites from a completely different location. This could mean that the sprites in emulation are not exactly synchronized with where they were supposed to be.

As usual, I have reported these findings to the MAME team so they can update the emulator files.

Get the files using the updater or download them directly from JTBIN.

[MostroW]

Thank you for another release, one of those arcade games i never actually played so might give this one a go!

EDIT:

Did an update just now and played the game for a few rounds, simple but entertaining game for sure!

[barfood]

Super fun game, had been looking forward to try it out! Last time I played it was on the Konami Arcade Classics compilation for DS. Cheers!

[netbeui]

Hi jotego, do you have any plans to add high score saving to any of your cores? I'm really enjoying Shaolin's Road (Kicker) and I'd love to be able to save my high score in the game itself vs on a piece of paper

A massive thanks to you for everything you do and your endless contributions to the MiSTer project!

[jotego]

Yes, I have a plan since a while ago but have been slow putting it to practice. Many of the cores I made in the second half of the year were designed to ease high score saving but I haven't added the rest of the logic needed to execute it yet.

[emmadness]

José, muchas gracias por este juegazo! Lo conocía muy poco y no puedo parar de jugarlo, jeje.

La opción de guardar los récords aún no está implementada, no?

Te mando un abrazo grande desde Argentina!

[Theenemy]

Plus 1 on saving for your cores .. would just be the icing on the cake for these amazing cores

[Theenemy]

Any news on highscore saving on these cores?